A City Across Time

Evening came down the Thames in colour. The sky warmed above the river, the city gathered its lights along both banks, and Tower Bridge stood in the middle of it all.
For years my work brought me regularly to London, and the city won me over completely. I chose hotels a good walk from the office, deliberately, so that the Thames could carry me to work and home again each day.
Those walks were never the same twice. The light changed, the weather turned with the seasons, and the people along the bank changed with them. I walked past centuries of history and, in some small way, walked inside it.
On this evening I left the usual paths and found a vantage away from where the crowds walk. The sky repaid the effort, filling with colour above the water. From here the bridge seemed to hold the old city and the new in a single view.
And the walks carried a private history too. Nearly two centuries ago my ancestors, the Skyrings, left London for the far side of the world, and became some of the earliest free settlers of Brisbane, my home city. Walking beside their river, I liked to think that one of their own was walking it again.
The composition stretches the city along the water, wide enough to take it all in. A city seen across distance and, in the same glance, across time.